As Toronto’s Little Jamaica fights to survive gentrification caused by a decade of transit construction, an independent report on Jamaica exposes gaps in Britain’s Windrush outreach, and the post-coronation debate over Jamaica’s republican future gathers momentum.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022 sent complex waves through the Jamaican diaspora and across the island itself — accelerating the republic movement, prompting fierce debate about the meaning of grief, and marking the end of an era that connected the Caribbean to the Crown through memory, loyalty and loss.

In March 2022, Prince William arrived in Jamaica to protests and a prime minister who told him Britain was being left behind. Three months later, a bronze family stood in Sunday best atop a pile of suitcases at Waterloo Station — the National Windrush Monument, unveiled by the same prince.

When Barbados became the Caribbean’s newest republic in November 2021, it electrified a conversation about Jamaica’s own constitutional future from Kingston to Brooklyn. In the same month, a damning parliamentary report found that only five per cent of Windrush scandal victims in Britain had received compensation.

In six weeks in the spring of 2020, a pandemic arrived and a man was killed on a street in Minneapolis, and the world the Jamaican diaspora had known changed in ways that are still being measured. The lockdown and George Floyd’s murder defined a generation.

The summer of 2012 was Jamaica’s summer. On 6 August, the island celebrated its 50th year of independence from Britain. Days earlier, Usain Bolt had sprinted to triple gold at the London Olympics. For the Jamaican diaspora in Britain, watching their homeland celebrated in the country they call home, the moment was one of extraordinary, complex, deeply felt pride.

In the first half of 2012, two jubilees were approaching simultaneously: the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June, marking sixty years on the throne, and Jamaica’s fiftieth anniversary of independence in August. For the Jamaican community in Notting Hill and across Britain, these dual commemorations arrived weighted with a history that was, in both directions, inescapable.

The England riots of August 2011, triggered by the killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, sweep through Caribbean-heritage communities and reignite debates about race, policing and belonging. In Jamaica, Bruce Golding resigns and Andrew Holness — at 39 the youngest PM in the island’s history — takes office. The diaspora ends the year shaken, watchful and resolute.

The first half of 2008 brought two overlapping crises that pulled the Caribbean community in Nottingham and across Britain in different directions. The knife crime emergency in London, which was placing young Black men at the centre of a national moral panic, demanded a response from a community that was simultaneously the victim of the violence and, in the media’s framing, part of its cause.

On 22 June 2008, Britain marks the 60th anniversary of the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks. Across the country, events celebrate six decades of Caribbean contribution to British life. But community leaders warn that celebration must not become complacency: inequalities persist, deportations continue, and the question of Britain’s full reckoning with its colonial past remains unresolved.